One up for british astronomy!

[palebluedot]

There's life in Jodrell Bank yet.

BBC News - Jodrell Bank chosen as base for largest radio telescope

[Trull]

Its definitely good news for astronomy in general, albeit the scope will be based in Oz most likely. I'm always amazed how far light will stretch.

[Capricorn]

Seems a shame that just the base will be here. The nice big bits that people get to play with will be either Australia or South Africa. Having the big bits they will also get a lot of influence over what goes on.

[FraserClarke]

There is no way you can locate the hardware in UK/Europe -- it is far far too noisy. You need to put it somewhere where you don't have 250 million people talking on their mobile phones all day and night You also need ~3000km of space to fit it all in!

Having the base in the UK is great news for the local economy (nice new building to build -- people to run it, etc). I would guess it will employ ~100 people or so. The headquarters (UK) will have much more of an influence on how the project is run than the operations sites -- though of course this is an international project and the major decisions will be made by an international board of all the partners. No astronomers will ever travel to the SKA physical site to do observations -- but they will come through the headquarters for conferences/discussions etc. So that will be a good thing for UK astronomy as well.